How one Cook County school district is preparing for shooting incidents and other emergencies

An 'active shooter' alert designed in the wake of the 2012 Connecticut school shootings

An app, a 'panic button' and an attempt to quicken emergency response to school shootings

Kenilworth School District’s 100 teachers and support staff will have a new tool at their fingertips this school year designed to instantly alert police and coworkers of shootings on the property.

The alert system is part of a smartphone and tablet app from Guard911, an Illinois company run by current and retired law enforcement officers.

An “active shooter” alert is the main feature of the company's SchoolGuard app, which speed-dials 911 and alerts all other users on the property and at participating nearby schools about unfolding incidents.

How SchoolGuard Works

This video gives you an in-depth look into the functionality and purpose behind our SchoolGuard¿ smartphone app.

This video gives you an in-depth look into the functionality and purpose behind our SchoolGuard¿ smartphone app.

This "panic button" also sends a notice to on- and off-duty law enforcement officers in the area. That notice gets sent to an app called Hero911, which law enforcement officers and emergency responders voluntarily download. Those officers thereby become part of the nationwide not-for-profit Hero911 Network.

The SchoolGuard app also gives teachers and staff members the ability to put the school on lockdown. The app works only on school property, the company says.

Since the app’s business launch in May, the company says, 60 schools in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Texas and New Jersey have signed on. The company said it is close to deals with schools in California and Maine and that it expects to be in 100 schools within the next few weeks.

For the service, schools pay a set-up fee of $2,500 and then $99 a month.

Kenilworth superintendent Kelley Kalinich said her one-school district of 525 students signed on in June. The company says Kenilworth, in Cook County, is the only Chicago-area school registered for the system.

“When I learned it was possible to have an app on your phone, it just seemed like a perfect solution,” Kalinich said. “If it’s one thing everybody has with them, it’s their cell phone.”

Guard911 co-founder Nate McVicker said the idea to equip teachers with such a tool came in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Connecticut, where a man shot 20 children and six adults before killing himself.

He said the company aims to decrease response time and to get more responders to the site of a school crime scene.

Kalinich said local emergency agencies had urged the district to provide all of its staffers the ability to call emergency teams, without going through a chain of command. The school had relied on panic buttons that were concentrated in and near administrative offices and that prompted a third party to contact the police department. Kalinich said all staffers will be walked through the system before the students arrive Wednesday.

“One of the things we learned when we partnered with law enforcement is they want all the employees to feel empowered,” she said. “If they wanted to trigger our emergency procedures, they shouldn’t have to go through the chain of command to do that. It’s not always convenient to track down principals.”

"Our belief is that every teacher should have the ability to put the school on lockdown," said Kenilworth Police Chief David Miller. "Everybody in that school should have the ability to make that call so that notification goes out to everybody."

Miller said the quicker police can respond, the more likely the number of injuries would be lower. "They try to shoot as many people in a short period of time before the police arrive," he said.

Company officials say the app provides school users and police with maps of where the shooting reports originate. Other features allow for teachers to send distress calls to other teachers in the building and for principals to send notices that unwanted individuals, such as registered sex offenders, are on the property.

“We know as police officers that bad things happen,” said Guard911 co-founder Mike Snyders, a retired Illinois State Police colonel and president of the Hero911 Network. “We realized we could make a difference with police response time. This could give them a 30- or 60- or 90-second head start if something ever happens.”